Monday, August 20, 2007

Once upon a time, dragonflies with 2-foot wingspans, millipede-like creatures 5 feet long, and other colossal insects inhabited the earth. While insect gigantism has long been seen in the fossil record, new research provides the best evidence yet that higher oxygen levels in the past spurred insect growth.

Like all animals, insects require oxygen to function; yet insects do not have lungs. Instead, holes in their exoskeletons allow air to enter a network of hollow tubes called tracheae, which branch throughout the body.

Alexander Kaiser, an insect physiologist at Midwestern University and lead author of the study, which appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, explained the tracheal system to WORLD: "The oxygen in the atmosphere travels down those tubes directly to the cells to be delivered to the places where energy is produced. The amount of oxygen available determines how far oxygen can travel down the tube."

Using specialized X-ray technology, Kaiser and his colleagues investigated the tracheal systems of several darkling beetles ranging in length from 3 millimeters to over an inch. They found that the larger the beetle, the greater proportion of space the tracheae took up. Although larger tracheae provided the necessary oxygen to the beetle's cells, they also crowded other organs and tissue, presumably limiting the overall size to which the beetle could grow.

However, if the atmosphere's oxygen level was greater in the past, as scientists believe it was (31 percent to 35 percent, compared to today's 21 percent oxygen rate), the tracheal tubes may have been able to support larger bodies while remaining relatively small. "When [the] oxygen available is higher, the dimensions of those tracheal tubes can be smaller compared to insects that live under normal oxygen concentrations, so they take up less space, and this space is free for other tissues," said Kaiser.

To test their hypothesis, Kaiser's team raised fruit flies in an oxygen-enriched chamber and found that the insects indeed grew larger, without an exaggerated increase in tracheae size. Darkling beetles are now being raised under similar conditions. Kaiser, who said he was surprised by the team's findings, wants to analyze even larger insects in the future.

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The above article hits on a point that agrees with YEC teaching. More oxygenated atmospheres produce larger creatures. Thus, huge dinosaurs and huge insects are found in the fossil record. Similar insects found now are generally much smaller and the accounts of dinosaurians in the records of mankind pre-1700 describe dinosaurs that, while still large, are not as huge as the saurians found in stone.

Washington DC – An abundance of new peer-reviewed studies, analysis, and data error discoveries in the last several months has prompted scientists to declare that fear of catastrophic man-made global warming “bites the dust” and the scientific underpinnings for alarm may be “falling apart.” The latest study to cast doubt on climate fears finds that even a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would not have the previously predicted dire impacts on global temperatures. This new study is not unique, as a host of recent peer-reviewed studies have cast a chill on global warming fears.

“Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing the new study which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Another scientist said the peer-reviewed study overturned “in one fell swoop” the climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore. The study entitled “Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth’s Climate System,” was authored by Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz. (LINK)

“Effectively, this (new study) means that the global economy will spend trillions of dollars trying to avoid a warming of ~ 1.0 K by 2100 A.D.” Dr. Wilson wrote in a note to the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee on August 19, 2007. Wilson, a former operations astronomer at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore MD, was referring to the trillions of dollars that would be spent under such international global warming treaties like the Kyoto Protocol.

“Previously, I have indicated that the widely accepted values for temperature increase associated with a doubling of CO2 were far too high i.e. 2 – 4.5 Kelvin. This new peer-reviewed paper claims a value of 1.1 +/- 0.5 K increase for a doubling of CO2,” he added.

Climate fears reduced to ‘children’s games’

Other scientists are echoing Wilson’s analysis. Former Harvard physicist Dr. Lubos Motl said the new study has reduced proponents of man-made climate fears to “playing the children’s game to scare each other.”

“Recall that most of the 1.1 degree - about 0.7 degrees - has already occurred since the beginning of the industrial era. This fact itself is an indication that the climate sensitivity is unlikely to be much greater than 1 Celsius degree: the effect of most of the doubling has already been made and it led to 0.7 K of warming,” Motl wrote in an August 17, 2007 blog post. (LINK)

“By the end of the (CO2) doubling i.e. 560 ppm (parts per million) expected slightly before (the year) 2100 -- assuming a business-as-usual continued growth of CO2 that has been linear for some time -- Schwartz and others would expect 0.4 C of extra warming only - a typical fluctuation that occurs within four months and certainly nothing that the politicians should pay attention to,” Motl explained.

“As far as I can say, all the people who end up with 2 or even 3 Celsius degrees for the climate sensitivity are just playing the children's game to scare each other, as [MIT climate scientist] Richard Lindzen says, by making artificial biased assumptions about positive feedbacks. There is no reasonable, balanced, and self-consistent work that would lead to such a relatively high sensitivity,” Motl concluded.

Overturning IPCC consensus ‘in one fell swoop’

The new study was also touted as “overturning the UN IPCC ‘consensus’ in one fell swoop” by the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Joel Schwartz in an August 17, 2007 blog post. (LINK)

“New research from Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes,” wrote AEI’s Schwartz, who hold a master’s degree in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology.

The study’s “result is 63% lower than the IPCC’s estimate of 3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2 (2.0–4.5 degrees C, 2SD range). Right now we’re about 41% above the estimated pre-industrial CO2 level of 270 ppm. At the current rate of increase of about 0.55% per year, CO2 will double around 2070. Based on Schwartz’s results, we should expect about a 0.6 degrees C additional increase in temperature between now and 2070 due to this additional CO2. That doesn’t seem particularly alarming,” AEI’s Schwartz explained.

“In other words, there’s hardly any additional warming ‘in the pipeline’ from previous greenhouse gas emissions. This is in contrast to the IPCC, which predicts that the Earth’s average temperature will rise an additional 0.6 degrees C during the 21st Century even if greenhouse gas concentrations stopped increasing,” he added.

“Along with dozens of other studies in the scientific literature, [this] new study belies Al Gore’s claim that there is no legitimate scholarly alternative to climate catastrophism. Indeed, if Schwartz’s results are correct, that alone would be enough to overturn in one fell swoop the IPCC’s scientific ‘consensus’, the environmentalists’ climate hysteria, and the political pretext for the energy-restriction policies that have become so popular with the world’s environmental regulators, elected officials, and corporations. The question is, will anyone in the mainstream media notice?” AEI’s Schwartz concluded.

UK officially admits: Global warming has stopped!

Recent scientific studies may make 2007 go down in history as the "tipping point" of man-made global warming fears. A progression of peer-reviewed studies have been published which serve to debunk the United Nations, former Vice President Al Gore, and the media engineered “consensus” on climate change.

Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works (LINK), noted in a June 18, 2007 essay that global warming has stopped.

“The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2. Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 %),” (LINK)

In August 2007, the UK Met Office was finally forced to concede the obvious: global warming has stopped. (LINK) The UK Met Office acknowledged the flat lining of global temperatures, but in an apparent attempt to keep stoking man-made climate alarm, the Met Office is now promoting more unproven dire computer model projections of the future. They now claim climate computer models predict “global warming will begin in earnest in 2009” because greenhouse emissions will then overtake natural climate variability.

Meteorologist Joseph Conklin who launched the skeptical website called www.Climatepolice.com in February 2007, recently declared, “global warming movement [is] falling apart.”“A few months ago, a study came out that demonstrated global temperatures have leveled off. But instead of possibly admitting that this whole global warming thing is a farce, a group of British scientists concluded that the real global warming won’t start until 2009,” Conklin wrote in an August 10, 2007 blog post on his website. (LINK)

But the credibility of these computer model predictions took a significant hit in June 2007 when Dr. Jim Renwick, a top UN IPCC scientist, admitted that climate models do not account for half the variability in nature and thus are not reliable. (LINK) In addition, Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, former CEO and director of research for the Netherlands Royal National Meteorological Institute, recently compared scientists who promote computer models predicting future climate doom to unlicensed “software engineers" who were "unqualified to sell their products to society." (LINK)

New peer-reviewed study on Surface Warming and the Solar Cycle: Excerpt: The study found that times of high solar activity are on average 0.2 degrees C warmer than times of low solar activity, and that there is a polar amplification of the warming. This result is the first to document a statistically significant globally coherent temperature response to the solar cycle, the authors note. Authors: Charles D. Camp and Ka Kit Tung: Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. Source: Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) paper 10.1029/2007GL030207, 2007 (LINK)

Belgian weather institute’s (RMI) August 2007 study dismisses decisive role of CO2 in warming: Excerpt: "Brussels: CO2 is not the big bogeyman of climate change and global warming. This is the conclusion of a comprehensive scientific study done by the Royal Meteorological Institute, which will be published this summer. The study does not state that CO2 plays no role in warming the earth. "But it can never play the decisive role that is currently attributed to it", climate scientist Luc Debontridder says. "Not CO2, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It is responsible for at least 75 % of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore's movie has hyped CO2 so much that nobody seems to take note of it." said Luc Debontridder. "Every change in weather conditions is blamed on CO2. But the warm winters of the last few years (in Belgium) are simply due to the 'North-Atlantic Oscillation'. And this has absolutely nothing to do with CO2," he added. (LINK)

New peer-reviewed study finds global warming over last century linked to natural causes:

Published in Geophysical Research Letters: Excerpt: “Tsonis et al. investigate the collective behavior of known climate cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, and the North Pacific Oscillation. By studying the last 100 years of these cycles' patterns, they find that the systems synchronized several times. Further, in cases where the synchronous state was followed by an increase in the coupling strength among the cycles, the synchronous state was destroyed. Then a new climate state emerged, associated with global temperature changes and El Nino/Southern Oscillation variability. The authors show that this mechanism explains all global temperature tendency changes and El Nino variability in the 20th century. Authors: Anastasios A. Tsonis, Kyle Swanson, and Sergey Kravtsov: Atmospheric Sciences Group, Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A. See August 2, 2007 Science Daily – “Synchronized Chaos: Mechanisms For Major Climate Shifts” (LINK)

Excerpt: This study published on August 9, 2007 in the Geophysical Research Letters finds that climate models fail test against real clouds. "To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent," Dr. Roy Spencer said. "At least 80 percent of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and clouds, and those are largely under the control of precipitation systems. Until we understand how precipitation systems change with warming, I don't believe we can know how much of our current warming is manmade. Without that knowledge, we can't predict future climate change with any degree of certainty," Spencer added. The paper was co-authored by University of Alabama Huntsville's Dr. John R. Christy and Dr. W. Danny Braswell, and Dr. Justin Hnilo of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA. (LINK)

New peer-reviewed study finds that the solar system regulates the earth’s climate -

The paper, authored by Richard Mackey, is published in the Journal of Coastal Research - Excerpt: “According to the findings reviewed in this paper, the variable output of the sun, the sun’s gravitational relationship between the earth (and the moon) and earth’s variable orbital relationship with the sun, regulate the earth’s climate. The processes by which the sun affects the earth show periodicities on many time scales; each process is stochastic and immensely complex. (LINK) & (LINK)

A July 2007 review of 539 abstracts in peer-reviewed scientific journals from 2004 through 2007 found that climate science continues to shift toward the views of global warming skeptics. Excerpt: “There appears to be little evidence in the learned journals to justify the climate-change alarm.” (LINK)

Chinese scientists Lin Zhen-Shan, and Sun Xian’s 2007 study, published in the peer-reviewed Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, noted that CO2’s impact on warming may be “excessively exaggerated.” Excerpt: “The global climate warming is not solely affected by the CO2 greenhouse effect. The best example is temperature obviously cooling however atmospheric CO2 concentration is ascending from 1940s to 1970s. Although the CO2 greenhouse effect on global climate change is unsuspicious, it could have been excessively exaggerated. It is high time to reconsider the trend of global climate change,” the two scientists concluded. (LINK) & (LINK)

Several recent scientific studies have debunked a media hyped UK study alleging there has not been a solar-climate link in the past 20 years. Excerpt: “The earth temperature does respond to the solar cycle as confirmed by numerous studies. The 11 year solar cycle is clearly shown in sediment cores obtained from Effington Inlet, Vancouver Island, B.C. by Dr. Tim Patterson, and in records of the Nile River , to name just two studies.” (LINK) & (LINK) & (LINK)

An August 2007 NASA temperature data error discovery has lead to 1934 -- not the previously hyped 1998 -- being declared the hottest in U.S. history. Excerpt: "NASA has yet to own up fully to its historic error in misinterpreting US surface temperatures to conform to the Global Warming hypothesis, as discovered by Stephen McIntyre at ClimateAudit.org." (LINK) [EPW Blog note: 80% of man-made CO2 emissions occurred after 1940. (LINK) ]

Numerous U.S. temperature collection data errors exposed by team of researchers led by Meteorologist Anthony Watts in 2007 (LINK) - “The (U.S.) National Climate Data Center (NCDC) is in the middle of a scandal. Their global observing network, the heart and soul of surface weather measurement, is a disaster. Urbanization has placed many sites in unsuitable locations — on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, even attached to hot chimneys and above outdoor grills! The data and approach taken by many global warming alarmists is seriously flawed. If the global data were properly adjusted for urbanization and station siting, and land use change issues were addressed, what would emerge is a cyclical pattern of rises and falls with much less of any background trend,” Meteorologist Joseph Conklin wrote in an August 10, 2007 blog post. (LINK)

Team of Scientists Question Validity Of A 'Global Temperature' – The study was published in Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics. Excerpt from a March 18, 2007 article in Science Daily: “Discussions on global warming often refer to 'global temperature.' Yet the concept is thermodynamically as well as mathematically an impossibility, says Bjarne Andresen, a professor at The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, who has analyzed this topic in collaboration with professors Christopher Essex from University of Western Ontario and Ross McKitrick from University of Guelph, Canada.” The Science Daily article reads: "It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth", Bjarne Andresen says, an expert of thermodynamics. "A temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system. Furthermore, the climate is not governed by a single temperature. Rather, differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate.” He explains that while it is possible to treat temperature statistically locally, it is meaningless to talk about a global temperature for Earth. The Globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless. Or talking about economics, it does make sense to compare the currency exchange rate of two countries, whereas there is no point in talking about an average 'global exchange rate.’” The article concludes: “Thus claims of disaster may be a consequence of which averaging method has been used, the researchers point out.” (LINK)

Even the alarmist UN has cut sea level rise estimates dramatically since 2001 and has reduced man’s estimated impact on the climate by 25%. Meanwhile a separate 2006 UN report found that cow emissions are more damaging to the planet than all of the CO2 emissions from cars and trucks. (LINK)

A May 2007 Senate Environment & Public Works report detailed a sampling of scientists who were once believers in man-made global warming and who now are skeptical. [See May 15, 2007 report: Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics: Growing Number of Scientists Convert to Skeptics After Reviewing New Research – LINK ]

An upcoming Fall 2007 blockbuster U.S. Senate report is set to be released that will feature a sampling of peer-reviewed studies and hundreds of scientists (many current and former UN scientists) who have spoken out recently against Gore, the UN, and the media engineered climate “consensus.” Please keep checking this blog for updates.

Prominent scientists speak out to calm CO2 emission fearsMany prominent scientists have spoken out in 2007 to debunk many fears relating to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball recently explained that one of the reasons climate models are failing is because they overestimate the warming effect of CO2 in the atmosphere. Ball described how CO2’s warming impact diminishes. “Even if CO2 concentration doubles or triples, the effect on temperature would be minimal. The relationship between temperature and CO2 is like painting a window black to block sunlight. The first coat blocks most of the light. Second and third coats reduce very little more. Current CO2 levels are like the first coat of black paint,” Ball explained in a June 6, 2007 article in Canada Free Press. (LINK)

Boston College paleoclimatologist Dr. Amy Frappier recently explained how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can cease to have a warming impact. Frappier noted in a February 1, 2007 article in Boston College’s newspaper The Heights, that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere do not consistently continue to have a warming effect on Earth, but gases instead stabilize in the atmosphere and cease having a warming effect.

"At some point the heat-trapping capacity of [CO2] and its effect gets saturated," said Frappier, "and you don't have increased heating." (LINK) "The geologic record shows that many millions of years ago, CO2 levels were indeed higher - in some cases many times higher - than today," Frappier, who believes mankind is having an impact on the climate, explained. According the article, Frappier criticizes Gore because “the movie (An Inconvenient Truth) fails to mention any ancient incongruity between carbon dioxide and temperature.”

Spitting outside has ‘same effect’ as doubling CO2

In May 2007, the “father of meteorology” Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at University of Wisconsin, dismissed fears of increased man-made CO2 in the atmosphere.

“You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide,” Bryson, who has been identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world, said. (LINK) “All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air,” Bryson added.

‘Temperature drives CO2’

Ivy League geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack, the chair of Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania recently spoke out against fears of rising CO2 impacts promoted by Gore and others. Giegengack does not even consider global warming among the top ten environmental problems.

“In terms of [global warming’s] capacity to cause the human species harm, I don’t think it makes it into the top 10,” Giegengack said in an interview in the May/June issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette. (LINK) Giegengack also noted “for most of Earth’s history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler.” (LINK) “[Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. That’s just wrong … It’s a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa,” Giegengack explained. “It’s hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2,” he added. (LINK)

“Certain ‘feedback loops’ naturally control the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A warmer temperature drives gases out of solution in the ocean and releases them,” he continued. “[Today, humans] are putting 6.5 billion tons of fossil-fuel carbon into the atmosphere, and only 3.5 billion is staying there, so 3 billion tons is going somewhere else. In the past, when the Earth’s climate rose, CO2 came out of the ocean, the soils, and the permafrost. Today as temperatures rise, excess CO2 is instead going into those and other reservoirs. This reversed flux is very important. Because of this, if we reduced the rate at which we put carbon into the atmosphere, it won’t reduce the concentration in the atmosphere; CO2 is just going to come back out of these reservoirs ... If we were to stop manufacturing CO2 tomorrow, we wouldn’t see the effects of that for generations,” Giegengack said.

Man-made CO2 equivalent to linoleum on first floor of 100 story building

Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, explained how miniscule mankind’s CO2 emissions are in relation to the atmosphere.

“If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our annual anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor,” D’Aleo wrote in an August 15, 2007 blog on his website www.IceCap.US. (LINK)

“Carbon dioxide is 0.000383 of our atmosphere by volume (0.038%). Only 2.75% of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic in origin. The amount we emit is said to be up from 1% a decade ago. Despite the increase in emissions, the rate of change of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa remains the same as the long term average (+0.45%/year). We are responsible for just 0.001% of this atmosphere. If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor. This is likely because the oceans are a far more important sink for excess carbon dioxide than generally accepted,” he explained.

NASA's James Hansen calls climate skeptics ‘court jesters’

In the face of this growing surge of scientific research and the increasing number of scientists speaking out, NASA scientist James Hansen wrote this past week that skeptics of a predicted climate catastrophe were engaging in “deceit” and were nothing more than “court jesters.”“The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present,” Hanson wrote on August 16, 2007. (LINK) & (LINK) & (LINK) [EPW Blog Note: It is ironic to have accusations of ‘deceit’ coming from a man who conceded in a 2003 issue of Natural Science that the use of “extreme scenarios" to dramatize global warming “may have been appropriate at one time” to drive the public's attention to the issue --- a disturbing admission by a prominent scientist. (LINK) Also worth noting is Hansen’s humorous allegation that he was muzzled by the current Administration despite the fact he did over 1400 on-the-job media interviews. (LINK) ]

If the scientific case is so strong for predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming, why do its promoters like Hansen and his close ally Gore feel the need to resort to insults and intimidation when attempting to silence skeptics? [EPW Blog Note: Gore and Hansen are not alone - See: EPA to Probe E-mail Threatening to ‘Destroy’ Career of Climate Skeptic - LINK ]

Media continues to ignore growing scientific evidence

The mainstream media’s response to these recent scientific developments casting significant doubt on warming fears has been – utter silence.

In fact, the media is continuing to promote the unfounded scaremongering of both Gore and actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Both Newsweek (LINK) and NBC Nightly News (LINK) thoroughly embarrassed themselves recently with “news” items on global warming. (EPW Blog Note: Newsweek’s cover article featured such shoddy reporting that the magazine was forced to debunk itself in the very next issue, as one of its own editors slapped the magazine down for a “highly contrived” and “ fundamentally misleading” article on global warming. See: (LINK) ]

I can't get past what Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo (the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting) said:

“If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our annual anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor,” D’Aleo wrote in an August 15, 2007 blog on his website www.IceCap.US. (LINK)“Carbon dioxide is 0.000383 of our atmosphere by volume (0.038%). Only 2.75% of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic in origin. The amount we emit is said to be up from 1% a decade ago. Despite the increase in emissions, the rate of change of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa remains the same as the long term average (+0.45%/year). We are responsible for just 0.001% of this atmosphere. If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor. This is likely because the oceans are a far more important sink for excess carbon dioxide than generally accepted,” he explained.

I believe the vast majority of meteorologists and climatologists who specialize in these fields knew the math all along. I still say that Global Dumbing is a hoax, a farce, a dirty trick being played on consumers and especially third world countries that flies in the face of real evidences.

Operational Science - "operational science is the nuts-and-bolts of science. The scientific method is a staple of operational science, in which:*a problem or question is addressed with a hypothesis*a test is devised that tests the hypothesis*if successful, the test is repeated several times and ways to see if the results are consistent*if still successful, now we have a valid theory*if the theory withstands further testing and is accepted by the scientific community as consistently true, it becomes a law."

Not to mention that operational science doesn't attempt to work beyond what is observable and testable today.

Two points about your operational science vs. historical science bit (which I note has made the rounds in creationist circles with the same gaping flaws as your argument) and especially about your erroneous claim that the theory of evolution is not subject to testing or observation:a. It is correct that, with any historical science, we cannot go back in time and find out 100% exactly what happened exactly when. We are indeed unable to observe directly with our own eyes events that lie in the past

So that part isn't a fallacy after all then? We have our first point of agreement.

– but that does not mean that what you refer to as historical science in this context is not subject to the scientific method in an attempt to get as close to an objective truth as possible.We cannot perform experiments in the sense of devising an experiment, physically going into a lab and performing the experiment. We can, however, use the scientific method and construct (and test) falsifiable hypotheses as follows:* a hypothesis is stated* a test is devised that tests the hypothesis: in this case, not a lab experiment, but a testable prediction – a prediction of what will and will not be found, because the “lab” of the archaeologist is our whole world, and the “experiments” are digs* if successful, the test is repeated several times and ways to see if the results are consistent* if still successful, now we have a valid theory

Wrong and wrong. You are going to go on to explain this and hang yourself in the process on the petard of your own reasoning...

For example, archaeologists in different parts of the world find fossils in different layers, allowing them to construct a rough timeline of what kind of fossils are found in which layers.

Ah-ah-ah! You are presupposing that fossils are layers according to a timeline in that different layers vary widely in age. You cannot prove that, you simply presuppose. In fact, the idea that the layering around the world is a result of flood and post-flood sedimentation makes much more sense. You are beginning with suppositions rather than facts.

Using radiometric dating, they can say that one layer in one location is the same age as another layer in another location.

As I have posted before and will post again, radiometric dating is very unreliable beyond a few thousand years. One of the dirty secrets of science is the number of times an object is dated by radiometrics and proof is then offered that the object is nowhere near as old as it was "dated." There is no dating method that is foolproof for a number of reasons stated previously, but for one thing we cannot know that systems in operation today were working the same way four thousand years ago because careful records and observations were not made. It is also true that, if there was a world-wide flood, anything found on earth before that flood was radically altered so that you could hardly "observe" what life and the earth was like previous to that event based on what is available to us in the rock layers.

These are observations.This allows them to form a picture of what kind of creatures lived at the same time, as well as before and after each other.

No, it most certainly does not. We can observe creatures that were buried during a catastrophic event and try to glean what we can from remains as to what they looked like and so on, but we cannot by any provable means determine dates.

From this they can form a hypothesis, say, that a certain creature evolves over time.

The hypothesis was already there. That was your presupposition in the first place. So far you have proved nothing.

From this, they can then construct a testable prediction, for example that if there were creatures that looked like X in one layer and there are creatures that looked like Z in another layer, that it is likely that we would find a transitional species Y in a layer that is dated by independent means to a time between the other two layers.

Besides the dating problem, it is no great feat to predict that a creature similar creatures will be found in different places. This is what we see all over the world today. Big surprise there.

But beyond that, the term "transitional species" is being bandied about. Is a salamander a transitional form? No, it is just a salamander. You want transitional, you have to find creatures that are in the middle of the transition from no eye to eye, yes, a partway eye that somehow functions as something else until it becomes an eye. Or, a Bombadier Beetle predecessor that has partly "evolved" some of the complex bombing apparatus and, again, is using it for something else until it can become the fiery weapon it is in creatures today.

(Note that such a prediction would confirm their hypothesis and falsify YEC, since especially the flood model offers no plausible explanation for the available data.)

I am waiting for such data....

Now, instead of heading into a lab and throwing some chemicals into a petridish (though more about that later), the scientists’ “test” is the next dig. They consistently find fossils that match the current understanding of the phylogenetic tree and the overall timeline. As they flesh out this model, there are occasional minor adjustments, but never anything that calls the entire model into question.The current scientifically accepted timeline was constructed in exactly this way, with many successive “tests” and predictions. (Tiktaalik is a good example of this.) Every time a new dig is started, scientists can predict with great certainty what kinds of fossils in general they will and will not find in each layer. That is not to say they won’t find new information (which is why they’re digging, after all), but it will not be information that fundamentally contradicts the current modern synthesis.Such predictions, by the way, universally elude creation science. Creation science has not come up with any consistent (and consistently confirmed) theory that explains why fossils are layered in predictable ways and in line with the phylogenetic tree. (Come to think of it, that was yet another question you were running away from a lot last year.)Tiktaalik, for example, was found when scientists were looking to fill in a part of the phylogenetic tree for which they did not yet have a fossil. They used a combination of dating methods and previous fossil finds of creatures both preceding and succeeding Tiktaalik to predict where such a fossil would be likely to be found – and found it.Such a (successful) prediction is one of many confirmations of the theory of evolution. Now, according to creation science, such a prediction should be impossible. And yet it was made and confirmed. You draw your own conclusions. If you have a logical explanation, by all means present it; if your only response is that “it’s just a matter of opinion”, then you’re conceding the logical argument.b. While creation science may be a purely historical (and speculative) science, the theory of evolution also covers genetics, biology etc. so actually there is no shortage of “going into a lab and doing an experiment” work as well. When hypothesizing, for example, that certain taxonomic groups split from each other at some point in the past, this can be observed not just in the fossil record, but also in a comparison of their DNA.

That certain animals are shown to be related is not a surprise to a YEC. In fact, we would expect that all animals found now are related to the animals found in fossil rocks. But this entire teaching about how the rock layers have the animals in "taxonomic order" is a complete pile of garbage that is as factual as the Haeckel drawings. In fact, the rock layers are not in consistent order around the planet. Not only that, often rock layers are assigned ages according to the fossils, which makes statements such as that above as classic circular reasoning. YEC models have several reasons why you would tend to find like animals grouped together.

(Yet another confirmation of the theory of evolution for which creation science offers no explanation.) See www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/25/AR2005092501177.html”>this article for an example.Creation science offers no research in this regard (again, because it is incapable of offering testable predictions). It only says that DNA is amazingly complex and must therefore be designed, and that’s where the matter rests.”

No, YEC says much more than that. In fact, YEC scientists and non-YEC scientists have discovered that DNA must be in place to code for the RNA which precedes DNA. Also, YEC proponents don't just say "it is too complex", but rather give very sound reasons why (chirality, for instance). Here is just one such article:

Many important molecules required for life exist in two forms. These two forms are non-superimposable mirror images of each other, i.e.: they are related like our left and right hands. Hence this property is called chirality, from the Greek word for hand. The two forms are called enantiomers (from the Greek word for opposite) or optical isomers, because they rotate plane-polarised light either to the right or to the left.

Whether or not a molecule or crystal is chiral is determined by its symmetry. A molecule is achiral (non-chiral) if and only if it has an axis of improper rotation, that is, an n-fold rotation (rotation by 360°/n) followed by a reflection in the plane perpendicular to this axis maps the molecule on to itself. Thus a molecule is chiral if and only if it lacks such an axis. Because chiral molecules lack this type of symmetry, they are called dissymmetric. They are not necessarily asymmetric (i.e. without symmetry), because they can have other types of symmetry.1 However, all amino acids (except glycine) and many sugars are indeed asymmetric as well as dissymmetric.

Chirality and life

Nearly all biological polymers must be homochiral (all its component monomers having the same handedness. Another term used is optically pure or 100 % optically active) to function. All amino acids in proteins are ‘left-handed’, while all sugars in DNA and RNA, and in the metabolic pathways, are ‘right-handed’.

A 50/50 mixture of left- and right-handed forms is called a racemate or racemic mixture. Racemic polypeptides could not form the specific shapes required for enzymes, because they would have the side chains sticking out randomly. Also, a wrong-handed amino acid disrupts the stabilizing α-helix in proteins. DNA could not be stabilised in a helix if even a single wrong-handed monomer were present, so it could not form long chains. This means it could not store much information, so it could not support life.2

Ordinary chemistry produces racemates

A well-regarded organic chemistry textbook states a universal chemical rule in bold type:‘Synthesis of chiral compounds from achiral reagents always yields the racemic modification.’ and ‘Optically inactive reagents yield optically inactive products.’3This is a consequence of the Laws of Thermodynamics. The left and right handed forms have identical free energy (G), so the free energy difference (ΔG) is zero. The equilibrium constant for any reaction (K) is the equilibrium ratio of the concentration of products to reactants. The relationship between these quantities at any Kelvin temperature (T) is given by the standard equation:

For the reaction of changing left-handed to right-handed amino acids (L → R), or the reverse (R → L), ΔG = 0, so K = 1. That is, the reaction reaches equilibrium when the concentrations of R and L are equal; that is, a racemate is produced. This explains the textbook rule above.

Separating the left hand from the right

To resolve a racemate (i.e. separate the two enantiomers), another homochiral substance must be introduced. The procedure is explained in any organic chemistry textbook. The idea is that right-handed and left-handed substances have identical properties, except when interacting with other chiral phenomena. The analogy is that our left and right hands grip an achiral (non-chiral) object like a baseball bat equally, but they fit differently into a chiral object like a left-handed glove. Thus to resolve a racemate, an organic chemist will usually use a ready-made homochiral substance from a living organism. The reaction products of the R and L enantiomers with an exclusively right handed substance R′ , that is R-R′ and L-R′ (called diastereomers), are not mirror images. So they have different physical properties, e.g. solubility in water, thus they can be separated.

However, this does not solve the mystery of where the optical activity in living organisms came from in the first place. A recent world conference on ‘The Origin of Homochirality and Life’ made it clear that the origin of this handedness is a complete mystery to evolutionists.4 The probability of forming one homochiral polymer of N monomers by chance = 2–N. For a small protein of 100 amino acids, this probability = 2–100 = 10–30. Note, this is the probability of any homochiral polypeptide. The probability of forming a functional homochiral polymer is much lower, since a precise amino acid sequence is required in many places. Of course, many homochiral polymers are required for life, so the probabilities must be compounded. Chance is thus not an option.

A further problem is that homochiral biological substances racemize in time. This is the basis of the amino acid racemization dating method. Its main proponent is Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.5 As a dating method, it is not very reliable, since the racemization rate is strongly dependent on temperature and pH, and depends on the particular amino acid.6 Racemization is also a big problem during peptide synthesis and hydrolysis.7 It shows that the tendency of undirected chemistry is towards death, not life.A tragic reminder of the importance of chirality is thalidomide. In the early 1960s, this drug was prescribed to pregnant women suffering from morning sickness. However, while the left-handed form is a powerful tranquilliser, the right handed form can disrupt fetal development, resulting in severe birth defects. Unfortunately, the synthesis of the drug produced a racemate, as would be expected, and the wrong enantiomer was not removed before the drug was marketed.8

In my own undergraduate chemistry education, one of the required experiments demonstrated these concepts. We synthesized the dissymmetric complex ion, [Co(H2NC2H4NH2)3]3+,9 from achiral reagents, so a racemate was produced. We resolved it by reacting it with a homochiral acid from a plant source, forming diastereomers that could be resolved by fractional crystallisation. When the resultant homochiral crystals were dissolved, and activated charcoal (a catalyst) added, the substance quickly racemized, because a catalyst accelerates approach to equilibrium.

Origin-of-life researchers have tried to think of other means of producing the required homochirality. There have been unsuccessful attempts to resolve racemates by other means.

Circularly polarized ultraviolet light

With circularly polarized light, the electric field direction rotates along the beam, so it is a chiral phenomenon. Homochiral substances have different absorption intensities for left and right CP light—this is called circular dichroism (CD).10 Similarly, CP light is absorbed differently by left and right enantiomers. Since photolysis (destruction by light) occurs only when light photons are absorbed, CP light destroys one enantiomer more readily than the other. However, because CP light also destroys the ‘correct’ form to some extent, this method would not produce the necessary 100 % homochirality required for life. One of the best results has been 20 % optically pure camphor, but this occurred after 99 % of the starting material had been destroyed. 35.5 % optical purity would have resulted after 99.99 % destruction.11 ‘A practically optically pure compound (99.99 per cent) … is obtained at an asymptotic point where absolutely no material remains.’12

Another problem is that magnitude and sign (i.e. right-favouring or left-favouring) of CD depends on the frequency of the CP light.10 This means that resolution can occur only with CP light over a narrow frequency band. Over a broad band, enantioselective effects would cancel.Circularly polarised light has recently been revived as a solution in a paper by the Australian astronomer Jeremy Bailey in Science,13 and widely reported in the media. His team has discovered circularly polarised infrared radiation in a nebula. They admit in the paper that they have not discovered the required circularly polarised ultraviolet light nor any evidence that amino acids are produced in nebulae. They are also aware of the very limited enantioselectivity of CP light, and the fact that the effect averages to zero over a whole spectrum (the Kuhn-Condon rule). However, their faith in chemical evolution colours the way they interpret the evidence.

Not all evolutionists are convinced by the proposal of Bailey’s team. For example, Jeffrey Bada said, ‘It’s just a series of maybe steps. To me, that makes the whole thing a big maybe.’14Another proposed source of circularly polarised light is synchrotron radiation from a neutron star,15 but this is speculative and doesn’t solve the chemical problems.

Beta decay and the weak force

β-decay is one form of radioactive decay, and it is governed by one of the four fundamental forces of nature, the weak force. This force has a slight handedness, called parity violation, so some theorists thought β-decay could account for the chirality in living organisms.16 However, the weak force is aptly named—the effect is minuscule—a long way from producing the required 100 % homochirality. One specialist in the chirality problem, organic chemist William Bonner, professor emeritus at Stanford University, said, ‘none of this work has yielded convincing conclusions’.17 Another researcher concluded:

‘the exceptional prebiotic conditions required do not favour asymmetric β-radiolysis as the selector of the exclusive signature of optical activity in living nature.’18

Another aspect of parity violation is that the L-amino acids and D-sugars have a theoretically slightly lower energy than their enantiomers so are slightly more stable. But the energy difference is immeasurable—only about 10–17 kT, meaning that there would be only one excess L-enantiomer for every 6x1017 molecules of a racemic mixture of amino acids!19

Optically active quartz powders

Quartz is a widespread mineral—the commonest form of silica (SiO2) on Earth. Its crystals are hexagonal and dissymmetric.20 So some investigators tried to use optically active quartz powders to adsorb one enantiomer more than the other. But they had no success. Besides, there are equal amounts of left and right-handed quartz crystals on Earth.21

Clay minerals

Some investigators have reported a very small chiral selection effect by clay minerals, but the effects may have been an artefact of the technique used. Selective adsorption and binding have now been rejected.22 Even if modern clays did have a chiral bias, this could be due to previous absorption of optically active biomolecules (which are, of course produced by living things). Prebiotic clays would then have had no chiral bias.

Self-selection

A small minority of chiral substances crystallize into homochiral crystals. Louis Pasteur was not only the founder of the germ theory of disease, the destroyer of ‘spontaneous generation’ ideas, and a creationist, he was also the first person in history to resolve a racemate. He used tweezers to separate the left and right-handed crystals of such a substance, sodium ammonium tartrate.23

This separation only happened because of outside interference by an intelligent investigator, who could recognise the different patterns. On the supposed primitive earth, there was no such investigator. Therefore the two forms, even if they could be separated by chance, would have re-dissolved together and re-formed a racemic solution.

Also, Pasteur was fortunate to choose one of the few substances that self-resolve in crystalline form. And even this substance has this property only below 23°C, so it’s perhaps fortunate that 19th century laboratories were not well heated!

Fluke seeding

Some theorists have proposed that a fluke seeding of a supersaturated solution with a homochiral crystal would crystallise out the same enantiomer. However, the primordial soup, if it existed,24 would have been extremely dilute and grossly contaminated, as shown by many writers.25 Also, nothing could be done with the growing homochiral crystal, because it would be immersed in a solution of the remaining wrong enantiomer. Concentrating the solution would crystallise out this wrong enantiomer. Diluting the solution would dissolve the crystal, so the alleged process would have to keep starting from scratch.

Homochiral template

Some have proposed that a homochiral polymer arose by chance and acted as a template. However, this ran into severe problems. A template of 100 % right-handed poly-C (RNA containing only cytosine monomers) was made (by intelligent chemists!). This could direct the oligomerisation (formation of small chains) of (activated) G (guanine) nucleotides. Indeed, pure right-handed G was oligomerised much more efficiently than pure left-handed G. But racemic G did not oligomerise, because:

‘monomers of opposite handedness to the template are incorporated as chain terminators … This inhibition raises an important problem for many theories of the origin of life.’26

Transfer RNAs selected the right enantiomer

One attempt to solve the chirality problem was proposed by Russell Doolittle, a professor of biochemistry at the University of California at San Diego, and an atheist. He claimed: ‘From the start of their [Transfer RNA synthetases’] existence, they probably bound only L-amino acids.’27 He never explains how such complicated enzymes could have functioned unless they were themselves homochiral, or how they would operate before RNA was composed of homochiral ribose. Doolittle’s ‘solution’ is mere hand-waving. It is hardly worth refuting except that it appeared in a well-known anti-creationist book, which says something about the quality of its editing, or the quality of anti-creationist arguments.

It seems like Doolittle was trying to explain away his prior televised evolution/creation debate with biochemist Duane Gish held before 5,000 people at Liberty University on 13 Oct 1981. The pro-evolution journal Science described the debate as a ‘rout’ in favour of Gish.28 The next day, the debate was reported by the pro-evolution Washington Post under the headline ‘Science Loses One to Creationism’. The sub-headline cited Doolittle’s anguished remark: ‘How am I going to face my wife?’ showing that Doolittle himself knew he was defeated.

Magnetic fields

Some German chemists, led by Eberhard Breitmaier of the Institute for Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University Gerhard-Domagk-Strasse in Bonn, announced that a very strong magnetic field (1.2–2.1 T) produced 98 % homochiral products from achiral reagents.29 So organic chemists like Philip Kocienski, of the University of Southampton, speculated that the earth’s magnetic field could have caused life’s homochirality. Although the earth’s magnetic field is about 10,000 times weaker than that of the experiment, Kocienski thought that vast time spans would result in the homochirality we see today.29 He may have forgotten about palaeogeomagnetic field reversals!

Yet other chemists like Tony Barrett, of London’s Imperial College, thought that the German experiment ‘seems just too good to be true.’29 This caution was vindicated about six weeks later. No-one else could reproduce the German team’s results. It turned out that one of the team, Guido Zadel, the post-doctoral fellow on whose thesis the original work was based, had adulterated the reagents with a homochiral additive.30

‘We eat optically active bread & meat, live in houses, wear clothes, and read books made of optically active cellulose. The proteins that make up our muscles, the glycogen in our liver and blood, the enzymes and hormones … are all optically active. Naturally occurring substances are optically active because the enzymes which bring about their formation … are optically active. As to the origin of the optically active enzymes, we can only speculate’31

If we can only ‘speculate’ on the origin of life, why do so many people state that evolution is a ‘fact’? Repeat a rumour often enough and people will swallow it.

It is important to emphasize that, in operational science, experimentation can yield results that can serve to more or less "prove" or "disprove" a hypothesis.”Again, while hypotheses and theories may be “disproven”, they are never “proven”, merely confirmed. “Proofs” happen in mathematics.”Sadly, the world doesn't understand this and many people believe that evolution, which is not even a testable theory, is a proven fact.”

Not only is the theory of evolution a testable theory, it is a tested theory.

Nope. You are beginning with presuppositions that provide you with a result that you desire, but because the presuppositions themselves are unproven, you have in fact proven nothing at all.

You’ve been arguing on this subject for years – would it kill you to read a mainstream text on the subject so you can argue your case more effectively?”So please understand that in the realm of historical science, particularly in the world of creation science versus evolution science, it is all about the interpretation of evidence, period. One must simply decide for oneself which model fits the evidence best in one's own opinion.”

... bearing in mind that the theory of evolution makes testable falsifiable predictions (see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ ) that are routinely confirmed, while creation science is incapable of offering such a thing. I guess it’s up to your opinion which of these two you would consider the more sound science.Or could you name any falsifiable predictions that creation science could offer, Radar?

Talkorigins is a terrible example for you to use, first of all. I pointed out last year that they still had disproven "proofs" in place on their website and, although these were pointed out to them, they remained. I might as well cite "Dr. Dino" in return.

Again, as I pointed out previously, YEC expects that the world would be covered with layers of rock, all of them with signs of water activity, and it would be quite possible for the layers to be found extending for many hundreds and perhaps thousands of miles. This has been found to be true.

YEC would predict that, occasionally, the remains of animals would be found to still be actual tissue rather than fossil, since the flood event was so relatively recent. Both the tissue remains of mammals and dinosaurs have been found in recent years.

YEC would predict that multiple species of the same basic kind of animal can be produced in just a few hundred years or less, thus accounting for the wide variety of species found on the planet today just a few thousand years after the flood event. This has proven to be observably true.

YEC would predict that, no matter how many generations of an animal were observed, it would never evolve into another kind of animal. This has proven to be true thus far (how many thousands of generations of bacteria and even fruit flies have we observed, eh?)

YEC would predict that every kind of animal found in fossils would have at least been noted to have existed in the records of early man, even if some of them have since fallen extinct. True.

There are many, many more. I have read articles by evolutionists about evolution being shown within the DNA code and it is always untrue. Yes, mutations can change DNA, but only in the way that one can shuffle cards. You can change the order, you can lose a card or two, but you never see a new card added to the deck. This is true with every form of life found on earth. Speciation and variation within kind has been observed, variation available from the genetic pool already in place. But new kinds of animals are not observed to arise.

In 2006, Dr. Georgia Purdom summarized the fallacy of the article with these bullet points:

"The amount of chimp DNA is 12% larger than what it is in humans.

Several hundred million bases (individual components of the DNA) of the chimp genome are still unanalyzed.

In many areas of the DNA sequence, major “rearrangements” seem apparent. These account for perhaps 4–10% dissimilarity between chimps and humans.

Chimps have 23 chromosomes and humans have only 22 (excluding sex chromosomes for both species)."

But we have learned much more recently. Allow me to quote from volume 21 (2) 2007 of the Journal of Creation - Peter Borger and Royal Truman:

"According to Darwinian theory, in the past we had a common ancestor with baboons, further back with bananas and still further with bacteria. This dogma has spread like a "meme", which is a contagious idea that propagates in a similar way as a virus by infecting brains, according the the inventor of the word, Richard Dawkins. In 2002, Roy Britten dispelled the first monkey meme that human and chimpanzee DNA sequences are 98.5% identical. He showed that when indel-mutations were also taken into account, the diffference suddenly became about 5%. The fact that chimpanzee genomes are about 10% larger than that of humans, a detail few people are aware of, raises the obvious question how a mere 5% difference, not to mention only 1%, could be mathematically even possible.

In 2005, the human and chimp genomes were compared. It became apparent that many protein coding genes fournd in humans are uniquely human and not found in chimpanzees. What about most of the other DNA, which does not code for proteins and differs between these organisms? Is there any significance to the differences, or are these biologically irrelevant?

MicroRNA

MicroRNA(miRNAs) genew, which do not code for proteins, are capturing headlines. MiRNAs are smaill single-stranded molecules consisted of ca.22 neucleotides, and have been shown to regulate the expression of genes either by blocking translations or inducing the degradation of selected mRNA strands. Typically, each kind of miRNA regulates the expression of hundreds of different mRNA, an inconceivable challenge for natural selection....

Using a new sequencing technique, Berezikov et al. (from a posting in 2006 in Natural Genetics) examined miRNAs expressed in human and adult brains, finding 447 new versions which had not been known earlier. They reported in December 2006 that about 8% of these new miRNA genes are uniquely human: 51 new sequences were absent in the chimpanzee dataset. In additiona, 25 miRNAs were found to be unique to the chimpanzee dataset, and none of these new miRNA are related to tRNAs, rRNAs or any other kinds of RNA expressed. Incidentally, there are hundreds of miRNA codes(miRNA does not appear in DNA) which appear in primate genomes but not in other taxa.

This is highly significant, since each miRNA can regulate networks of dozens or hundreds of mRNAs.....

Instead of a handful of differences between human and chimpanzee genomes scientists must now confront the possibility that many among the tens of millions of differences actually have biological significance..."

All creatures have some similarity in DNA, which testifies to a common designer. But certainly with each new finding about the human genome, the idea of humans having evolved from apes or anything else becomes more and more absurd.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Much of the composition of DNA has been derided as "junk" by evolutionists who insist that this is yet another proof that DNA is an evolved blueprint (there is an oxymoron for ya) rather than a designed one. But as we learn more about DNA....

Chromosomes are compact linear entities in the nucleus of the cell. They are composed mainly of DNA, some RNA, and proteins called histones. People have been created with 23 matched pairs (46 total) of chromosomes. Years ago, scientists discovered that only about three percent of the human genome (the complete set of DNA inherited from the father and mother) is comprised of genes--about 35,000 of them. The remaining 97 percent was given the unscientific title of "junk" because secular biologists felt that over evolutionary time the DNA had lost its function. This useless DNA was the foundation for the secular argument that the genome was not designed.

Creation scientists countered--as they did with other alleged vestigial organs and tissues--that just because we don't know the function at the present, that doesn't mean the DNA doesn't have some important function. One need only look at the tonsils and appendix that were once taught by Darwinists to be vestigial but are now known, thanks to good scientific research, to serve important functions in the human body.

Sadly, the title "junk DNA" stuck, and hundreds of thousands of biology students and laymen were taught--incorrectly--that the trillions of cells in our body had mostly vestigial or useless genetic material (DNA) that served no function. Today, it is more correct to say that some sections of DNA are non-coding, but are not junk and have an important function.

For example, it has been discovered that some of the formally "useless" DNA actually controls embryos. An article in Developmental Cell magazine1 by Barbara Knowles and others examines the surprisingly high level of DNA called transposable elements (TEs) in the maternal transcriptome in mouse eggs and initial cleavage embryos. TEs or "jumping genes" are a number of types of DNA pieces found in virtually all life forms. They function as promoters (specific areas of a DNA molecule containing sequences required for critical function) for a number of RNA molecules. This scientific research counters the evolutionary assumption that many repetitive TEs in the human genome are useless. "I think a lot of 'junk DNA' has a function, and in a weird way it's controlling gene expression," stated Dr. Knowles.

Cells also contain introns, non-coding sections of DNA that are spliced out of the messenger RNA (mRNA) strand before it leaves the nucleus of a cell to become translated in the cytoplasm. This splicing technique is quite complicated and requires enzymes and energy. Such a complex performance led many to suspect that introns have a control function.2

Creationists continue to state that God doesn't make junk. Instead, we have been "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 137).

We will be posting positive articles concerning Creation science as requested by readers. Here is the first in the series:

Noah's Flood—what about all that water?

Where did all the water come from for the Flood? Was there a water vapor canopy? How was Mount Everest covered with water? Where did the water go after the Flood? How could this have happened?

In telling us about the globe-covering Flood in the days of Noah, the Bible gives us much information about where the waters came from and where they went. The sources of the water are given in Genesis 7:11 as ‘the fountains of the great deep’ and the ‘windows of heaven.’

The fountains of the great deep

The ‘fountains of the great deep’ are mentioned before the ‘windows of heaven,’ indicating either relative importance or the order of events.

What are the ‘fountains of the great deep?’ This phrase is used only in Genesis 7:11. ‘Fountains of the deep’ is used in Genesis 8:2, where it clearly refers to the same thing, and Proverbs 8:28, where the precise meaning is not clear. ‘The great deep’ is used three other times: Isaiah 51:10, where it clearly refers to the ocean; Amos 7:4, where God's fire of judgment is said to dry up the great deep, probably the oceans; and Psalm 36:6, where it is used metaphorically of the depth of God's justice/judgment. ‘The deep’ is used more often, and usually refers to the oceans (e.g., Genesis 1:2; Job 38:30, 41:32; Psalm 42:7, 104:6; Isaiah 51:10, 63:13; Ezekiel 26:19; Jonah 2:3), but sometimes to subterranean sources of water (Ezekiel 31:4, 15). The Hebrew word (mayan) translated ‘fountains’ means ‘fountain, spring, well.’1

So, the ‘fountains of the great deep’ are probably oceanic or possibly subterranean sources of water. In the context of the Flood account, it could mean both.

If the fountains of the great deep were the major source of the waters, then they must have been a huge source of water. Some have suggested that when God made the dry land appear from under the waters on the third day of creation, some of the water that covered the earth became trapped underneath and within the dry land.2

Genesis 7:11 says that on the day the Flood began, there was a ‘breaking up’ of the fountains, which implies a release of the water, possibly through large fissures in the ground or in the sea floor. The waters that had been held back burst forth with catastrophic consequences.

There are many volcanic rocks interspersed between the fossil layers in the rock record—layers that were obviously deposited during Noah's Flood. So it is quite plausible that these fountains of the great deep involved a series of volcanic eruptions with prodigious amounts of water bursting up through the ground. It is interesting that up to 70 percent or more of what comes out of volcanoes today is water, often in the form of steam.

In their catastrophic plate tectonics model for the Flood (see What about continental drift?), Austin et al. have proposed that at the onset of the Flood, the ocean floor rapidly lifted up to 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) due to an increase in temperature as horizontal movement of the tectonic plates accelerated.3 This would spill the seawater onto the land and cause massive flooding—perhaps what is aptly described as the breaking up of the ‘fountains of the great deep.’

The windows of heaven

The other source of the waters for Noah's Flood was ‘the windows of heaven.’ Genesis 7:12 says that it rained for 40 days and 40 nights continuously.

Genesis 2:5 tells us that there was no rain before man was created. Some have suggested that there was no rainfall anywhere on the earth until the time of the Flood. However, the Bible does not actually say this, so we should not be dogmatic.4

Some have argued that God's use of the rainbow as the sign of His covenant with Noah (Genesis 9:12-17) suggests that there were no rainbows, and therefore no clouds or rain, before the Flood. However, if rainbows (and clouds) existed before the Flood, this would not be the only time God used an existing thing as a special ‘new’ sign of a covenant (e.g., bread and wine in the Lord's Supper).

It is difficult to envisage a pre-flood water cycle without clouds and rain, as the sun's heat, even in that era, must have evaporated large volumes of surface waters which would have to have eventually condensed back into liquid water. And droplets of liquid water form clouds from which we get rain.

The expression ‘windows of heaven’ is used twice in reference to the flood (Genesis 7:11, 8:2). It is used only three times elsewhere in the Old Testament: twice in 2 Kings 7:2 and 19, referring to God's miraculous intervention in sending rain, and once in Malachi 3:10, where the phrase is used again of God intervening to pour out abundant blessings on his people. Clearly, in Genesis the expression suggests the extraordinary nature of the rainfall attending the flood. It is not a term applied to ordinary rainfall.

What about ‘the waters above’?

We are told in Genesis 1:6-8 that on the second day of creation God divided the waters that were on the earth from the waters that He placed above the earth when He made a ‘firmament’ (Hebrew: raqiya, meaning ‘expanse’) between those waters.5 Many have concluded that this ‘expanse’ was the atmosphere, because God placed the birds in the expanse, suggesting that the expanse includes the atmosphere where the birds fly. This would put these waters above the atmosphere.

However, Genesis 1:20, speaking of the creation of the birds, says (literally) ‘let the birds fly above the ground across the face of the expanse of the heavens.’6 This at least allows that ‘the expanse’ may include the space beyond the atmosphere.

Dr Russell Humphreys7 has argued that since Genesis 1:17 tells us that God put the sun, moon, and stars also ‘in the expanse of the heaven’ then the expanse must at least include interstellar space, and thus the waters above the expanse of Genesis 1:7 would be beyond the stars at the edge of the universe.8

However, prepositions (in, under, above, etc.) are somewhat flexible in Hebrew, as well as English. A submarine can be spoken of as both under and in the sea. Likewise, the waters could be above the expanse and in the expanse, so we should be careful no to draw too much from these expressions.

So what were these ‘waters above’? Some have said that they are simply the clouds. Others thought of them as a ‘water vapor canopy,’ implying a blanket of water vapor surrounding the earth.

A water vapor canopy?

Dr Joseph Dillow did much research into the idea of a blanket of water vapor surrounding the earth before the Flood.9 In a modification of the canopy theory, Dr Larry Vardiman suggested that much of the ‘waters above’ could have been stored in small ice particles distributed in equatorial rings around the earth similar to those around Venus.10

The Genesis 7:11 reference to the windows of heaven being opened has been interpreted as the collapse of such a water vapor canopy, which somehow became unstable and fell as rain. Volcanic eruptions associated with the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep could have thrown dust into the water vapor canopy, causing the water vapor to nucleate on the dust particles and make rain.

Dillow, Vardiman and others have suggested that the vapor canopy caused a greenhouse effect before the Flood with a pleasant subtropical-to-temperate climate all around the globe, even at the poles where today there is ice. This would have caused the growth of lush vegetation on the land all around the globe. The discovery of coal seams in Antarctica containing vegetation that is not now found growing at the poles, but which obviously grew under warmer conditions, was taken as support for these ideas.11

A vapor canopy would also affect the global wind systems. Also, the mountains were almost certainly not as high before the Flood as they are today, as we shall see. In today's world, the major winds and high mountain ranges are a very important part of the water cycle that brings rain to the continents. Before the flood, however, these factors would have caused the weather systems to be different.

Those interested in studying this further should consult Dillow's and Vardiman's works.

A major problem with the canopy theory

Vardiman12 recognized a major difficulty with the canopy theory. The best canopy model still gives an intolerably high temperature at the surface of the earth.

Rush and Vardiman have attempted a solution,13 but found that they had to drastically reduce the amount of water vapor in the canopy from a rain equivalent of 40 feet (12 meters) to only 20 inches (.5 meters). Further modeling suggested that a maximum of 2 meters (6.5 feet) of water could be held in such a canopy, even if all relevant factors were adjusted to the best possible values to maximize the amount of water stored.14 Such a reduced canopy would not significantly contribute to the 40 days and nights of rain at the beginning of the Flood.

A vapor canopy holding more than 7 feet (two meters) of rain would cause the earth's surface to be intolerably hot, so a vapor canopy could not have been a significant source of the floodwaters.

Many creation scientists are now either abandoning the water vapor canopy model15 or no longer see any need for such a concept, particularly if other reasonable mechanisms could have supplied the rain.16 In the catastrophic plate tectonics model for the Flood,17 volcanic activity associated with the breaking up of the pre-Flood ocean floor would have created a linear geyser (like a wall) of superheated steam from the ocean, causing intense global rain.

Nevertheless, whatever the source or mechanism, the scriptural statement about the windows of heaven opening is an apt description of global torrential rain.

Where did the waters go?

The whole earth was covered with the floodwaters (see Chapter 10, Was the Flood global?), and the world that then existed was destroyed by the very waters out of which the land had originally emerged at God’s command (Gen. 1:9, 2 Pet. 3:5–6). But where did those waters go after the Flood?

There are a number of Scripture passages that identify the floodwaters with the present-day seas (Amos 9:6 and Job 38:8–11, note ‘waves’). If the waters are still here, why are the highest mountains not still covered with water, as they were in Noah’s day? Psalm 104 suggests an answer. After the waters covered the mountains (verse 6), God rebuked them and they fled (verse 7); the mountains rose, the valleys sank down (verse 8) and God set a boundary so that they will never again cover the earth (verse 9).18 They are the same waters!

Isaiah gives this same statement that the waters of Noah would never again cover the earth (Isaiah 54:9). Clearly, what the Bible is telling us is that God altered the earth’s topography. New continental land-masses bearing new mountain chains of folded rock strata were uplifted from below the globe-encircling waters that had eroded and leveled the pre-Flood topography, while large deep ocean basins were formed to receive and accommodate the Flood waters that then drained off the emerging continents.

Without mountains or seabasins, water would cover the whole earth to a depth of 2.7 km, or 1.7 miles (not to scale).19

That is why the oceans are so deep, and why there are folded mountain ranges. Indeed, if the entire earth’s surface were leveled by smoothing out the topography of not only the land surface but also the rock surface on the ocean floor, the waters of the ocean would cover the earth’s surface to a depth of 2.7 kilometers (1.7 miles).19 We need to remember that about 70% of the earth’s surface is still covered by water. Quite clearly, then, the waters of Noah’s Flood are in today’s ocean basins.

A mechanism?

The catastrophic plate tectonics model (What about continental drift?) gives a mechanism for the deepening of the oceans and the rising of mountains at the end of the Flood.

As the new ocean floors cooled, they would have become denser and sunk, allowing water to flow off the continents. Movement of the water off the continents and into the oceans would have weighed down the ocean floor and lightened the continents, resulting in the further sinking of the ocean floor, as well as upward movement of the continents.20 The deepening of the ocean basins and the rising of the continents would have resulted in more water running off the land.

The collision of the tectonic plates would have pushed up mountain ranges also, especially towards the end of the Flood.

Could the water have covered Mount Everest?

Mt Everest is almost 9 km (5.5 miles) high. How, then, could the Flood have covered ‘all the high hills under the whole heaven’?

The Bible refers only to ‘high hills,’ and the mountains today were formed only towards the end of, and after, the Flood by collision of the tectonic plates and the associated upthrusting. In support of this, the layers that form the uppermost parts of Mt Everest are themselves composed of fossil-bearing, water-deposited layers.

This uplift of the new continental land-masses from under the Flood waters would have meant that, as the mountains rose and the valleys sank, the waters would have rapidly drained off the newly emerging land surfaces. The collapse of natural dams holding back the floodwaters on the land would also have caused catastrophic flooding. Such rapid movement of large volumes of water would have caused extensive erosion and shaped the basic features of today’s Earth surface.

Kata Tjuta in central Australia is composed of material which must have been deposited quickly by water.

Thus it is not hard to envisage the rapid carving of the landscape features that we see on the earth today, including places such as the Grand Canyon of the USA. The present shape of Uluru (Ayers Rock), a sandstone monolith in central Australia, is the result of erosion, following tilting and uplift, of previously horizontal beds of water-laid sand. The feldspar-rich sand that makes up Uluru must have been deposited very quickly and recently. Long-distance transport of the sand would have caused the grains to be rounded and sorted, whereas they are jagged and unsorted. If they had sat accumulating slowly in a lake bed drying in the sun over eons of time, which is the story told in the geological display at the park center, the feldspar would have weathered into clay. Likewise, if Uluru had sat in the once-humid area of central Australia for millions of years, it would have weathered to clay.21 Similarly, the nearby Kata Tjuta (The Olgas) are composed of an unsorted mixture of large boulders, sand and mud, indicating that the material must have been transported and deposited very rapidly.

Receding floodwaters eroded the land, creating river valleys. This explains why rivers are often so much smaller than the valleys they flow in today—they did not carve the valleys. The water flow that carved out the river valleys must have been far greater than the volume of water we see flowing in the rivers today. This is consistent with voluminous Flood waters draining off the emerging land surfaces at the close of Noah’s Flood, and flowing into the rapidly sinking, newly prepared, deep ocean basins.

Our understanding of how the Flood could have occurred is continually developing. Ideas come and go, but the fact of the Flood remains. Genesis clearly testifies to it, Jesus and the Apostles confirmed it, and there is abundant global geological evidence for a global watery cataclysm.

References and notes

Strong's Concordance.

Evidence is mounting that there is still a huge amount of water stored deep in the earth in the crystal lattices of minerals, which is possible because of the immense pressure. See L. Bergeron, Deep waters, New Scientist155(2097):22–26, 1997. ‘You have oceans and oceans of water stored in the transition zone. It's sopping wet.’

Some have claimed that because the people scoffed at Noah's warnings of a coming flood, that they must not have seen rain. But people today have seen lots of rain and floods, and many still scoff at the global Flood. Genesis 2:5 says there was no rain yet upon the earth, but whether or not it rained after that in the pre-Flood world is not stated.

In trying to disparage the Bible, some skeptics claim that the raqiya describes a solid dome and that the ancient Hebrews believed in a flat earth with a slotted dome over it. Such ideas are not in the Bible or in the Hebrew understanding of raqiya. See J.P. Holding, Is the raqiya a solid dome? Equivocal language in the cosmology of Genesis 1 and the Old Testament: a response to Paul H. Seely, CEN Technical Journal13(2):44–51, 1999.

Psalm 148:4 seems to speak against the canopy theory. Written after the Flood, this refers to ‘waters above the heavens’ still existing, so this cannot mean a vapor canopy that collapsed at the flood. Calvin, Leupold and Keil and Delitzsch all wrote of ‘the waters above’ as merely being clouds.

Of course, we may never arrive at a correct understanding of exactly how the Flood occurred, but that does not change the fact that it did occur.

A good authority for this may surprise some people: Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of Darwin’s theory! So he counts as a hostile witness, and he was a surveyor so knew what he was talking about in this case. In Man's Place in the Universe, Ch. XII, he wrote:

According to the best recent estimates, the land area of the globe is 0.28 of the whole surface, and the water area 0.72. But the mean height of the land above the sea-level is found to be 2250 feet, while the mean depth of the seas and oceans is 13,860 feet; so that though the water area is two and a half times that of the land, the mean depth of the water is more than six times the mean height of the land. This is, of course, due to the fact that lowlands occupy most of the land-area, the plateaus and high mountains a comparatively small portion of it; while, though the greatest depths of the oceans about equal the greatest heights of the mountains [we now know they are greater, so if anything he underestimated the ability to cover the whole earth—Ed.], yet over enormous areas the oceans are deep enough to submerge all the mountains of Europe and temperate North America, except the extreme summits of one or two of them. Hence it follows that the bulk of the oceans, even omitting all the shallow seas, is more than thirteen times that of the land above sea-level; and if all the land surface and ocean floors were reduced to one level, that is, if the solid mass of the globe were a true oblate spheroid, the whole would be covered with water about two miles deep.

The geological principle involved is isostasy, where the plates are ‘floating’ on the mantle. The ocean basins are composed of denser rock than the continents, so the ocean basins sit lower in the mantle than the less dense continents with their mountains.

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